In the Margins
by LaughingSenselessly
Summary: Bellamy's yawning, perhaps not noticing the way she's suddenly looking at him, like she wants to draw those clean lines of his shoulders as he stretches his neck, to admire his beauty by committing it to paper rather than just passively watching it. (The evolution of Clarke drawing Bellamy. Missing Scenes /Post-Canon)
**A/N: I realize there are 101 Clarke-draws-Bellamy fics but tAKE A GUESS HOW MANY SHITS I GIVE.**

 **This was written for smallestbrown on tumblr as part of the Bellarke Spring Fling fic exchange, and now that gifters have been revealed, I'm sharing it with the rest of you. :)**

 ** _Original prompt: Bellamy catches Clarke drawing him. (He kind of keeps letting it happen.)_**

* * *

She sees him for the first time in the dropship, when he's about to open the door. And when their eyes meet, the first thing that crosses her mind is _wow_ , what an excellent subject for her sketchbook he would be.

Then he opens his mouth, and her fingers instantly stop itching.

—

It all started the first time Finn brought her pencils from the bunker, and Clarke tested them out on the thick pad of paper he'd scavenged. She'd started out trying to draw Finn as he adopted ridiculous poses and made them both giggle, and then later she'd spend hours in her tent drawing the landscape, with the fresh perspective she had of it now that they were on the ground.

She never meant to start drawing Bellamy— it just happened of its own accord while she was daydreaming. One minute she was shading in a pine tree, and the next thing she knew her pencil was leaving bold, gently curving strokes over what she immediately recognized as his jawline.

She stops herself as soon as she realizes what she's doing. But every time she goes to draw something on her pad of paper, she's forced to flip past the silhouette of that smug bastard's profile mocking her.

Yet, she can't bring herself to get rid of it.

—

It's an uneventful evening at the dropship camp, and the campfire area clears out a little earlier than usual, leaving just Clarke and her co-leader behind. It's not an uncommon occurrence, but Clarke's not an idiot; she knows that they're not all sleeping. They're probably getting moonshine from Monty and Jasper, banging each other in their tents, and engaging in other forms of general teenage fuckery.

She wonders when she stopped relegating herself into that group. She's only just eighteen, after all.

She glances beside her, where Bellamy is lying stretched out on his back on a log, arms stretched up with his fingers laced behind his head. He's so perfectly still she might think he was dozing, but his eyes are open. He's looking up at the sky with a somber expression on his face. If he's noticed they are the only two around the campfire now, he doesn't say anything.

She already has her sketchbook open, and has been doodling a two headed deer for the past hour, but she suddenly realizes the light from the fire is glinting nicely off his cheekbones and really— _really—_ it would be absolutely criminal not to take advantage of this situation. It's the perfect lighting for some shading practice.

Nodding to herself firmly, she starts to draw, lightly sketching the lines of his muscular shoulders first. But her fingers get restless, wanting to get to the main attraction. His face.

The thing about drawing Bellamy is that— it's difficult. More difficult than drawing anyone else. Finn's features are classic, easy to draw. Bellamy's something different. It starts out easy enough— dark, confident lines that outline his strong body, his arms, the graceful curve of his neck, the sharp angle of his jaw, but when she gets to his face, those bold lines don't work anymore. They need something softer, more understated, and the more she has to erase, the more frustrated she gets. Forgetting herself, she takes a moment to look up and observe him, sticking the pencil between her teeth to try to burn the shadows under his cheekbones into memory.

WIthout warning, he turns his head towards her and a shadow of— something?— crosses over his face. She instantly puts her head down, but she thinks he might have realized.

(But if he realized, wouldn't he say something? He _is_ a smug bastard, after all.)

In any case, all he says is, "What are you drawing there, princess?" And his voice isn't mocking or knowing, it's just soft in a way that it isn't when the kids are around.

She taps her pencil nervously against the paper a few times before stopping herself. "Just— a deer," she lies easily.

She thinks she sees his mouth twitch. "Are you going to let me see?"

"No," she says automatically.

He studies her for a moment more, then shrugs and turns his face back to the sky. Clarke lets out a quiet breath, her shoulders relaxing.

She waits a few minutes before she starts drawing again.

—

Clarke spends a good chunk of her time in the med bay while the delinquents are hard at work preparing for inevitable war against the Grounders. They keep getting injured, and Bellamy working them hard doesn't really help. She gets why, though. He doesn't want to see them all slaughtered by the army coming for them. There's a lot of work to do to prepare. And with that, comes a lot of tough love.

She's rolling bandages when she hears Bellamy outside the dropship, shouting her name.

She drops the roll and runs out, hearing the urgency in his voice, but her feet halt when she realizes he's _shirtless_.

It takes her an embarrassingly long moment to get over this fact. Then she realizes the reason he's shirtless is because he's tied his shirt around Sterling's leg, where she can see a dark blossom of red beginning to creep its way through the blue fabric. Sterling is standing on his other leg, and has his arm slung heavily over Bellamy's shoulder.

"We were hunting, and these idiots were just swinging their axes around," Bellamy grits out with derision, but his gaze on Sterling is very concerned. Sterling, for his part, looks very pale.

"Okay," Clarke sighs, and she grabs Sterling's other arm and the two of them bring Sterling into the med bay.

While she's bandaging the boy up, Bellamy lurks behind her with his arms crossed over his chest, watching her work. She tells him to either get out or do something useful, so he starts handing her tools when she tells her to. "Moonshine." "Scalpel." "Water."

Sterling passes out immediately after, and Clarke finally has a chance to lean back and take a deep breath. She glances at Bellamy, and once again her eyes are drawn to his chest. He's very dark in complexion, from both his ethnicity and the tan earned from toiling in the sun. His body is all smooth, strong lines. The way the glowing light that streams through the dropship curtain falls in rugged patterns over his arms and stomach betrays the fact that he's very muscular in a lean sort of way.

God, he's _beautiful_.

She tries to banish the thought immediately after it crosses her mind, but it won't go. He's yawning, perhaps not noticing the way she's suddenly looking at him, like she wants to draw those clean lines of his shoulders as he stretches his neck, to admire his beauty by committing it to paper rather than just passively watching it.

But— _Yawning_. He's exhausted.

"You should take a nap," she tells him, trying not to sound as affected as she feels. "You look bone-tired."

"Not a chance," he says, sounding a little weary under the bravado. "The Grounders could be knocking on our door any day now. We need them to keep working."

"They _are_ ," Clarke retorts. He doesn't look convinced, so she points to a chair near the wall of the dropship and makes her voice as commanding as she can. "Taking a few minutes to rest won't affect how fast we're making bullets. Now, sit."

He stares at her for a moment more before shaking his head and muttering something that sounds like "bossy princess". He walks over and sits down, and immediately his body seems to relax into it. His head thuds back to hit the wall and he slouches, exhaling.

Clarke turns away to wash her hands and put away her tools.

When she's done she turns back to him, opening her mouth to tell him that he can leave now, but she's surprised to find that he's fallen asleep. His eyes are closed but his lashes flutter in rapid, small cycles, betraying how deeply tired he's been.

Her fingers twitch, and her eyes stray to the sketchbook she still has in the corner of her work table.

A minute later, she's got her drawing materials balanced out on her lap and she's furiously sketching, incredibly aware of how he might wake up any moment. But she can't stop herself. Not when she's slowly been getting better at drawing him. He's the one subject that escapes even her formidable artistic talent.

She's learned that his face can't be drawn with sharp lines. His features are subtle, but together they create the most strong picture imaginable. She dulls her pencil by repeatedly running it over the lines of his biceps and jaw, and when its edge is round, she turns it to an angle and softly shades his collarbone, his abdomen, the muscles in his neck. That's the trick, she thinks, it's shading. His wide nose, his shapely mouth, the little cleft in his chin. They need to be brought to three dimensions by shadows and light and nothing but. So she shades them softly.

She's so absorbed in her drawing that when someone bursts into the dropship, she jumps, her sketchbook and pencils clattering to the floor.

Raven, the intruder, laughs at the sight. "Easy, Clarke. It's just me." She goes to pick up up the sketchbook, and Clarke's heart rises into her throat.

She tries to snatch for it, but she's too late. Raven straightens up with the book, barely passing her eyes over it as she offers it to Clarke before some realization crosses her face and she looks back down at the page.

Clarke stands. "Raven—" She can feel the flush colouring her cheeks.

Raven's eyebrows are rising and her lips parting the more she looks at it, and Clarke scrambles for what she's going to say when Raven asks, because of _course_ she's going to ask—

Raven holds the pad of paper out to her.

Clarke looks at her drawing dangling out of Raven's outstretched hand, and back at Raven's face.

The mechanic's face doesn't hold any mockery, surprisingly, but perhaps a trace of amusement at Clarke's stricken expression. "Looks good," Raven merely says.

Then her mischievious dark eyes dart to Bellamy in the corner, and _there_ , suddenly the double-meaning is there, but Raven's easy, suggestive grin somehow puts Clarke at ease as well. She shakes her head ruefully and finally accepts the sketchbook back.

"It's not— " Clarke struggles to explain why she's drawing him, because it's not about him being attractive— well, that's _part_ of it, she's self-aware enough to admit that to herself; but there's something so intrinsically interesting about the way he looks from an artistic perspective. He's unique, and he's a challenge, and he drives her up the wall and intrigues her at the same time.

She doesn't want to say that either, because somehow that sounds worse to her than merely admitting— _yeah, he's hot_ —, so instead all she tells Raven is, "Please don't say anything." The last thing she needs is more camp gossip that will give the younger delinquents fodder to disrespect her.

Raven studies her expression for a moment before she replies. "I won't." She crosses the floor now, walking over to where Bellamy is, and to her relief that's all there is to that. "They're asking for him outside," she explains to Clarke before she taps Bellamy on the nose.

Maybe it's just Clarke's paranoia, but she thinks that he wakes a little too quickly.

—

In retrospect, she wishes she hadn't been so cagey about drawing Bellamy Blake. Because now that he's not here, and possibly dead (but no, she refuses to believe that), she wishes she had taken the time to get good at drawing him.

She's alone in the dorm; everyone else is in the dining hall. It's the perfect time to retrace her map of Mount Weather. But after a while her mind strays. She's gone over it so many times, and she's tired of looking at it.

So she flips the page of the sketchbook Dante gave her and starts to draw Bellamy, opting to focus on the back of him, his broad shoulders that stretch his jacket, his legs, his hair that's a little longish and curls over the collar at the back.

God, his _hair—_ His hair is difficult too. Smooth, straight hair is easiest to draw and easiest to highlight. Bellamy's is different— It's rough and uniquely textured, and it flops over his head differently every day. She tries to sketch highlights into his hair but quickly realizes it doesn't work. The sun doesn't bounce off of it; in fact, his hair seems to absorb all light. It's black as night.

Then she looks at the coloured pencils that Dante's given her, and all at once a whole new world seems to open up.

She colours in his jacket a dark, dusty blue, and she roots around the case looking for a pencil that might match the colour of his skin so she can shade in the back of his neck and his hands. But when she retrieves the "skin tone" labelled pencil, it's too light, peach-coloured like her own, and she frowns, searching for a darker one, but the chocolate pencil is _too_ dark. There's not a pencil that matches his skin tone, and it's frustrating that the case contains all these wonderful colours but doesn't have one that matches _Bellamy_.

Instead, she mixes and matches and finds that it works better. She uses the peach, and blends it lightly with the brown, but the colour is too matte, not vibrant enough, so she adds a tint of pink, and suddenly it's nearly _right._ She smiles, pleased at the accuracy of it. If she lets herself stare at it for too long, it's almost like he's right there with her and she's gazing at the brown back of his neck, expecting him to turn around so she can see the little smirk playing at his lips and the lively glint in his eyes.

But no matter how hard she stares, Bellamy never turn around.

—

When she returns to Arkadia and is told Finn and Bellamy are not there, she almost cries, and while she's in the med bay staring up at the ceiling, letting her mother and Jackson treat her, she draws.

She has no tools, of course. But her fingers remember his profile. No one notices, far too busy fussing over the wounds on her face and starting an IV in her arm, but her other arm is stretched out and her index finger strokes his now familiar profile in a simplified way against her own thigh.

She traces over the lines over and over again as if she can burn him into her skin.

—

She finally sees him again, and she draws him that very afternoon. Unabashedly, while they are sitting together in the mess hall for lunch with Raven. She has her book propped up against the edge of the table, on her lap. Raven notices what she's doing, since she's sitting beside her; Clarke can tell by how she cocks her head as she watches the process.

Clarke doesn't care. She's gotten rusty, she finds with horror. The entire time they've been separated, she's been drawing his nose wrong. And his hair, did she really think it curled that way? And his freckles; she's been forgetting about his freckles, and how they splatter like flecks of paint across his cheeks and nose. She's been doing it _wrong_ , all wrong.

She doesn't care to hide it anymore, just bends over her sketchpad and works, so when he asks her, "Drawing something interesting?" She says, "yep," without looking up and he raises his eyebrows and glances at Raven. Raven shrugs, a little smirk on her face. And Clarke's even ready to inform him of what exactly she is drawing if he asks, because she's just so relieved he's living and _breathing_ across from her.

But curiously, he doesn't ask. He glances at her sketchpad once more, although he can't see through it to the other side, of course. But he doesn't look curious at all; he just takes a swig of water and turns his attention back to his food.

—

They get Finn back in the most horrific way possible, and Clarke is shaken by it.

She's been avoiding him, of course, after the village massacre. She can't bring herself to think about it, and in the quiet times in between meals she finds herself turning to her sketchbook more and more to get her mind off of him.

Bellamy doesn't question her when she knocks on the door to his quarters, just studies her expression and lets her in. She's grateful, knowing at least _he_ understands.

He sits in a wooden chair and resumes reading a tattered book while she lies on his bed on her stomach facing him and sketches. They sit in companionable silence, and Bellamy doesn't talk unless she talks to him first. She's grateful for that too.

But as she's drawing the sweep of his eyelashes as they look down at a page, she says, "What are you reading?" She's just trying to make conversation.

"Beowulf," he tells her, holding it up so she can see the tattered letters on the cover.

"Oh," she says. She's silent for a moment; she's never read that one. "What's it about?"

He hesitates, and she frowns.

"What, you think I won't understand or something? Go on."

"That's not it," he says, but she gives him a look and he sighs. "It's about a hero named Beowulf. He kills monsters."

Clarke can tell this is a brutally simplified explanation. "What kind of monsters?" She asks absentmindedly, shading in his hair as dark as she can with her HB pencil. She idly wishes she had a 6B; she can't get his hair as black as it is with this one.

"The bad kind."

"Who decides if they're good or bad?" Clarke says, and maybe there's a bit of defensiveness that creeps into her voice, because recent events are still stinging her. "Maybe that's just what they had to do."

"Well," Bellamy replies rather bluntly, "Grendel— the first monster that he kills— slaughters thirty men in their sleep, all at once."

Clarke feels suddenly rather like her throat has closed off, and she stares at her doodle, not really seeing it. All she sees is a rifle dangling from Finn's hands, and bodies of villagers everywhere, and the _look_ on his face.

Bellamy's watching her carefully, and she suddenly understands why he didn't want to bring it up.

She swallows and closes her sketchpad, working to keep her voice even. "We need to talk about how to get everyone out of Mount Weather," she informs him, pulling her hand drawn map out and showing it to him.

He puts down his book, expression relaxing a bit, and stretches. "Over drinks?" He offers.

—

Bellamy has gone to the Mountain, and she sits besides the radio for a while like she's on watch.

Raven has left her white marker besides the board, and Clarke can't help but be drawn to it in the meantime. She needs something to do with her hands rather than chew on her thumbnail in anxiety.

She slips off the stool and goes to the board, uncapping the marker and moving to a corner of the board that isn't filled with hastily scrawled chemical formulas.

Drawing realistically with markers is difficult, so she draws a cartoon version of the man on her mind, with an exaggeratedly big smile, square jaw and curly hair so unruly and thick it falls over his eyes like a sheepdog. It's a quick little doodle, and then she takes two steps back to admire it from afar, feeling a fond smile pulling onto her lips.

She leaves the room a little later, but she leaves the drawing on the board hoping to make Raven laugh the next time she comes in.

The next time Clarke checks in on the radio, the drawing is still there, but someone's added a twirly moustache to it.

She smiles at the addition, but her heart aches.

—

She misses him, so she draws him.

She and Lexa have been working on the war strategy, and in between she settles down in her tent with the few scrap pieces of paper she has shoved into her pocket, and the nub of pencil folded in the paper, to draw.

She draws him like Atlas, holding the Earth on his back, and a determined look set into his expression. But there's weariness, too; and it makes her feel a little guilty.

She's more than a little worried; he still hasn't shut down the acid fog, and every moment he spends in there makes Clarke more anxious. Like she sent him there to do a job and then die like an animal in a cage.

She thinks this to herself as she traces the lines of his hand as it reaches behind him to balance the Earth on his back, fingers outstretched. He's got beautiful hands, from what she remembers. Large palms and long fingers, calluses that indicate how hard he's worked in his life. Those hands are strong enough to carry the world.

That doesn't mean he _has_ to, though.

She's entranced with her drawing, so she doesn't even notice that Lincoln has entered her tent until he says behind her, "You're a good artist."

She smoothly folds her paper and stands up in the same motion, her expression turning guarded. "So are you," she says, and sees a surprised look flit over his face that she knows that he draws.

But he smiles slowly, gently. "You saw my drawings of Octavia."

"And other things," Clarke says. He's talented, that much is clear from what Clarke saw of his work.

"Yes, but it was Octavia that inspired me," he replies. "I was almost obsessed. I wanted to draw her right. Capture her essence in my journal, in case I never saw her again." There's a rather knowing look in his eyes.

Clarke smiles back, fake and tight-lipped. "That's nice."

He ignores her shallow words. "Just like how you do." He nods to the piece of paper folded in her fist.

Her hand shakes, and she opens the paper a teensy bit to peek at it. There's something about Lincoln, his gentle demeanor despite his large, hulking figure, that makes her feel like she can open up to him. She swallows and looks up at him. "What if I sent him there to _die_ , Lincoln?"

Lincoln offers no reassurance, and Clarke thinks she likes it better that way. Nothing would reassure her anyways, and she thinks he understands that because he feels the same kind of guilt. They watch each other in silence, and Lincoln is studying her rather intensely under that black warpaint, like she's a puzzle he hasn't quite figured out. Clarke is about to ask him why he's here (probably a summons from Lexa) when the man speaks again.

"May I ask you something?" Lincoln inquires carefully.

"Of course," Clarke says without really thinking.

"What is he to you?" he asks. When Clarke is left staring at him, he prods further. "Bellamy. Is he a co-leader? Friend?" She blinks, mouth opening and closing. "Your lover?"

Clarke again says nothing. The truth is, she is struck dumb by this simple question. A question she's never truly asked herself before.

She glances down at her drawing again, at the curls that fall over his eyebrows, the set to his lips, the tension in his jaw. _What is he to you_? echoes in her mind. He's… not her friend, or her co-leader, certainly not her lover. It doesn't seem right to fit Bellamy into any of those boxes anyway. He's something… undefinable, she realizes, and that fact disturbs her. He's the way her heart lifts when she sees him like it does with no one else. He's the strength and freedom she feels when he's by her side. He's the firm grip of his arms tight around her waist as he hugs her, exhaling into the crook of her neck.

She realizes Lincoln's still waiting for an answer. "He's…" she doesn't know how to put it into words and taps her pencil nervously on the nose she's drawn on him, giving him extra freckles. "He's just… Bellamy." It's the most honest answer she can give. He's Bellamy, and _Bellamy_ to her is a noun and a descriptor and an _ideal_ , an abstract concept, all at once.

She only wishes her feeble drawings could capture the essence of what Bellamy is, but it can't. Her lines still fall flat onto a page, and after all their time having been separated she has become obsessed with making a true representation of him to look at when the man himself is not around. It feels like they spend more time apart than together nowadays.

She misses him.

Lincoln nods like he understands, and the way his eyes are gentle and firm makes Clarke think that maybe he really does. " _'Belomi_ ,'" he says. "A beautiful friend."

Clarke draws her legs up onto her chair and hugs her knees, mind already far away thinking about a man with freckles like constellations on his cheeks and eyes that have always sung to Clarke, _You're home_. "Something like that."

—

Clarke lies awake in her tent and thinks about the fact that Bellamy is probably dead. He shut down the acid fog but he never reported back. Faced with the possibility that he simply isn't coming back, she can't help but be assaulted with emotions she _doesn't want_.

 _You care about him more_ , Lexa had accused her softly.

I care about him the _most_ , Clarke thinks, bewildered, and this slow, dawning realization of the past few weeks shakes her. She's shaken by the memory of colliding with his chest upon seeing him alive, like she couldn't keep her unbridled joy in the confines of her body. She's shaken by his expression when she told him to go to Mount Weather, like she's betrayed him; and she's shaken by the inexplicable feeling that she's betrayed him _again_ after she kissed Lexa.

But the thought of a world without him in it is what shakes her the most.

She tucks away her paper and pencil; her hands can't seem to draw anymore.

—

When Clarke leaves Arkadia after Mount Weather, she doesn't draw for months. She's too busy struggling to survive on her own.

But that doesn't mean he's not on her mind.

—

In Polis, Clarke finds herself sitting around with nothing to do more often than not. She manages to scrounge up some paper and a pen, and one day she and Lexa are in her room and Lexa falls asleep on the couch, she takes the peace and quiet as an opportunity to draw.

It's been a while, so it takes some time for her to find her groove. But when she does, she finds herself drawing his face. She tries to replicate his relieved little grin when he saw her for the first time in three months, to commit it to the paper as well as she's seared it into her memory.

She takes her time on his freckles, and then colours in his hair with the pen, deep and black as the ink. The pen starts to run out of ink partway through, and she scrapes the pen harder into the page. It's still rather faint. She shakes the pen absentmindedly, staring into the eyes she's drawn. They don't look as full of warmth as she remembers; she's failed to capture that. Instead, they look cold, empty, almost angry.

It reminds her of the snarl on his face when she told him he was staying in Polis.

She swallows, turns the piece of paper over, and begins to draw a sleeping Lexa instead.

—

It's peace time. The threats of the Mountain Men, ALIE and others have passed. It's legitimate, real peace; there's none of the old tensions, and lines have been drawn. Rules have gone up. Coalitions have formed, friendships between peoples. They can finally _breathe_.

It's for these reasons that Clarke wouldn't have expected that Bellamy would go missing.

But he does; one day he goes off on a hunting trip ("Be safe," she told him sternly, and he saluted her mockingly before turning into the forest) and he simply does not come back.

The man who was accompanying him hasn't been found either. But a day after that, he stumbles into Arkadia with dried blood caked onto his face and yells that they were attacked by Grounders.

Clarke flies into a panic, because Grounders have _Bellamy_.

The Sky People immediately jump to action, communicating with the clans that live around them, but nothing has changed; there's no act of war here. A rebel group appears to be the ones who've taken Bellamy, perhaps out of a sense of revenge.

"But why him?" Clarke asks desperately when Kane informs her of this in a quiet, grave tone. "I've done worse, I've killed people too—"

"Clarke," Kane gently interrupts her babbling with a hand on her shoulder. "We're going to try to find him. Do you want to help us?"

She nods mutely.

—

She's ready to storm the woods with a rifle in her hand looking for Bellamy, but instead they have her draw him.

Missing posters, they explain. They'll distribute a few of them to some of the neighbouring clans who might recognize him.

So Clarke sits at her work table and pulls out her pens and she draws him. This time there's no posing, no artistic lighting. She's doing a mug shot.

She has to make several copies of the drawing, so she doesn't spend so much time on the little things, choosing instead to draw a generic head on which she can emphasize the characteristics that she thinks would be most recognizable; his hair that falls messily over his forehead, the scar in his lip, the freckles across his cheeks and nose, the cleft in his chin.

She holds it up for Raven and Octavia to see. "Does it look like him?"

Raven tilts her head. "Yes, it does."

"Yeah," Octavia agrees, arms folded tightly. "I guess."

When Octavia leaves, Raven sticks behind for a moment to whisper, "It's not your best one, though."

Clarke tries her best not to blush.

—

When they get word that Bellamy's been found, Clarke's in the med bay with her mother, but her nerves have been fraying for a week and a half so she's up in a flash and grabbing the radio from the guard's hand to hear them better, to hear them say that they have him, he's _alive_ , and they'll be back at camp with him within the hour.

She nearly sobs at the news, and she can't get anything done. Abby forces her out because she's frightening the patients, so she wanders to the gates of the camp and waits there with Raven. They sit on a boulder and Raven puts her hand on top of Clarke's in a silent reassurance.

"Your missing posters helped," Raven tells her. Clarke offers a watery smile. God, she's barely keeping it together and Bellamy isn't even back yet.

Then there are shouts from outside, and shouts from inside, and Clarke rises from her seat, eyes riveted on where the gates are beginning to open.

The first thing she sees is Octavia, leading the group with her sword in hand and a hard look on her face. Clarke looks past them, this whole group of people, and finally finds him leaning on someone for support.

His name falls from her lips instinctively, and his head jerks up from where it's been lolling on his shoulders. She can see dark, radiating bruises on his face but it doesn't matter right now.

Her feet start moving, and she walks towards him just as he slowly limps towards her.

She reaches out her arms with full intention to hug him, tears already blurring her vision, but he holds out a hand to stop her and she freezes. Maybe he's too hurt to hug her.

Just that thought makes her a little angry under the relief.

His left hand moves into his jacket, and she thinks maybe he's clutching a bruised rib, but no, it looks like he's rooting around for something. After a second, he pulls it out— a folded piece of paper, and he lets go of who's been supporting him to carefully stand on both of his feet. Then he unfolds the paper with slow, deliberate movements of his hands and finally turns it to show to her.

It's one of her missing posters, with his likeness staring flatly back at her.

He finally speaks. "You drew this?" His voice is a little raspier than usual, almost a croak. She hears Raven mutter behind her, "I'll get him some water."

Clarke nods, mutely, because now she's noticing that the poster, despite being shoved in his jacket and subject to wear and tear, isn't crumpled. It's like he's been folding it the same way every time; there's no multiple crease lines. The crisp crease lines that _are_ there have been carefully folded and flattened so many times that it has turned the page delicate, liable to tear at those crease edges at any time.

Meanwhile, he opens his chapped lips again to speak, coughing a little bit, and Clarke leans forward in anticipation of whatever he's going to say to her. It's not what she expects.

"This is a _shit_ drawing, Clarke."

She gapes at him, almost about to say _it's not that bad_ , although she agrees, it's not her best work, because she was too _worried_ about him to think about the quality. But then he gets a good look at the expression on her face he starts laughing. _Laughing_ , crazily loud, hysterically almost, and Clarke's eyebrows rise even further. It's like he's been thinking about what her reaction to this statement would be and her actual reaction was so much better.

He's so stupid, she thinks fondly once she's gotten over her shock, watching him run a hand over his face as he wheezes. Maybe in a different situation she'd be mildly annoyed by his playful bribing, but first of all she knows his current state of hysteria is largely thanks to extreme dehydration; that, and today she can't feel anything but relief that he's even _alive_ to be standing in front of her.

He's still chortling when Clarke grabs his face roughly in her hands and closes the distance between their lips, right in front of the whole camp.

(She's very satisfied that he immediately stops laughing.)

—

Later, Clarke learns that the people who abducted Bellamy were Skaikru, three men from camp who had had a family member die in the Culling. One of them had stumbled back to camp bloody to blame the Grounders and get the attention off themselves. They're now in lock-up, with the council still mulling over what to do with them.

Sometimes Clarke forgets that she and Bellamy have enemies _everywhere_.

Bellamy tells her how his captors brought one of those posters into his prison to mock him, and he'd taken it and kept it close.

"I felt like it was yours," he tells her. "Even though I've never seen one of your drawings of me, I just thought it must be one of yours."

Clarke's cheeks burn, because he _knew_ , of course he always knew. He grins, and she punches him in the chest half-heartedly.

"I loved that you did that," he reassures, dropping a kiss on her lips. "And I may have let it happen… more than once."

Clarke thinks about something Lincoln said, a long time ago. She reaches forward to touch Bellamy's jaw. "I drew you because you inspired me," she whispers, hoping he hears everything she isn't saying. "You still do."

He inspires her to draw, and to persevere, and to live a life that is more than just surviving; and by the way Bellamy's eyes soften, she thinks that the feeling is mutual.

—

It is a lazy morning in camp, and Clarke is choosing to spend the morning in her blankets, drawing.

She's lying on her stomach with her sketchbook on her pillow. Her brows are furrowed; she's going to draw him _properly_. She wants to capture him in sleep, on his stomach with his face turned to the side. It's a unique image in that his brow is smoothed over, lips slightly parted. He looks almost boyish like this.

She's delicately adding the dark span of his eyelashes when she feels Bellamy's nose nudging against her naked shoulder, and his warm, sinewy arms wrapping around her waist under the blanket.

She smiles to herself. "Glad you're finally up."

He flips onto his back, off of her, and rubs a hand over his face. She misses his body heat immediately. "Maybe you tired me out last night." There's a playfulness in his tone.

"You're such an old man."

"So you like drawing old men?" He glances over at her sketchbook. "Kind of weird, Clarke." He laughs and ducks his head into his pillow when she reaches out with her free hand to swat his ear.

She resumes drawing, and he props himself up on his elbows to watch her careful strokes of pencil. "Why do you like drawing _my_ ugly mug, anyway?"

She almost laughs. " _Ugly_?" He's attractive as all hell and he knows it. "So what should I be drawing instead?"

"Someone beautiful," he responds immediately, "like you." He tucks an errant piece of hair back behind her ear.

She makes a face. "It feels weird to draw myself."

"Okay," he says agreeably, and reaches for her pencil. "Let me try, then."

She decides to humor him, lets go of her pencil and lets him tug her sketch pad towards himself and flip to a fresh page. She leans on his shoulder while he draws, and it quickly becomes clear he's making it a joke. He scrawls a painfully simply stick-man on the page, gives it long, spaghetti-like hair. She's giggling into her hand, letting him go on, until he starts drawing exaggeratedly large incisors and she decides enough is enough, pushing him onto his back and clambering on top of him.

"Maybe that's enough drawing for today," she says, leaning in close to pluck the pencil from his fingers and throw it to the side. "Don't you think?"

His large hands automatically go to her hips to steady her. "I thought you'd never ask." Clarke leans down to kiss him, and as always she feels both a spark of something exciting and also a warmth that has nothing to do with physical intimacy flood her body. Because she's here, with _him_ , and that's all that matters.

She can curl her hands into his 6B-dark hair, trace her fingers over his smattering of freckles, kiss the scar on his lip, press herself against his brown skin, and relish in the feeling of his large palms sliding over her back. Sometimes she has trouble drawing these things about him, but it's okay. She has the real thing— she can always touch them instead.

And besides, she muses when his fingers suddenly start to tickle her sides and all she can hear are her own peals of laughter, there is one thing she can _always_ draw from Bellamy— strength.

* * *

 **A/N: If you enjoyed, I would LOVE a review so that I could shower you with appreciation. :D In any case, thanks for reading!**

 **wellsjahasghost on tumblr :)**


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